John Powys - The Brazen Head

Instead therefore of being in the least perturbed by the towering belly and menacing hooves hovering above him, the Lord of Roque experienced the sort of exultation that Job declares Behemoth felt when he believed he could drain Jordan to the dregs of all its waters.

Spardo was so astonished at what he now beheld that he rose from his seat on the tree-stump and stood like one confounded. Master Peter whose magnetic experiment was the cause of this classic catastrophe, did what Friar Bacon’s collapse had clearly not made him do. He carefully shifted, in a number of minute jerks, his perilous lodestone. He did this knowing the thing couldn’t be lost, for its velvet container was suspended by a cord from his waist; and he adjusted it now so that while it was still in contact with his bare skin, it was at the base of his stomach and quite out of reach of his organs of generation.

But not a soul in that small lantern-lit group was more astonished than was Cheiron himself when he felt, hurled against his privy parts — which were, and this was no doubt an additional effect of Master Peter’s experiment, unusually excited just then — the formidable skull of the Lord of Roque.

Unable now to bring his legs to the ground, the angry horse found his right hoof hanging helplessly over the man’s left shoulder and his left hoof thrust out at an extremely awkward and even a painful angle over the man’s right shoulder, while he himself, his whole equine shape and deformed neck, was lifted bodily off the ground!

It only lasted a second, this incredible display of human strength, a display that Hercules himself would have witnessed with amazement: but when it was over the Lord of Roque and his deformed antagonist were struggling together on the ground.

And it was then that there occurred the same total collapse of consciousness in the brain of the Lord of the Manor as had occurred some half a dozen hours earlier in the case of Friar Bacon. At one second he was saying to himself: “I am a beast. Man is no more. Your own beasthood learn to adore!” and was beginning to force himself to enjoy the strong hirsute odour of Cheiron’s under-belly, when suddenly, without any warning at all, everything became dark, and he himself became as nonexistent as if he had never been born.

The sharp-eyed dame of the gate-keeper had already left her less alert husband’s side; and with a thick scarf round her head, and a still thicker one round her shoulders, was soon at the side of her unconscious master; and it can be imagined, with an experienced old lady of her sort at the head of affairs, and with the gate-keeper, inspired by her example, obedient to her least hint, how soon it was that the Lord of the Fortress lay stretched out on his own bed with Lady Val bending over him and his three children, along with excited emissaries from every part of the Fortress, hovering round the door.

Both Spardo and Cheiron were comfortably asleep, and also in closer proximity to each other than anyone who had witnessed the recent struggle and its surprising termination would have predicted, before Master Peter of Maricourt had succeeded in persuading the perspicacious lady of the gate-house to allow him a sleeping-place. This indeed, when she found it for him, could not be called under her roof, for it was in the back premises of the Fortress on the opposite side from the entrance, but such as it was, it was so much in the warmest part of the whole building and so surrounded by the sleeping-places of animals, that when Peter of Picardy had settled his great black head on the sack of wool that formed his substantial pillow, he found that the melancholy wailing of the wind across the forest was so comfortably animalized by the noises of the beasts in his immediate vicinity that his thoughts became so agreeable to him that he felt reluctant to fall asleep too quickly.

His present situation was indeed so harmonious with his mood that he disentangled his precious lodestone, which, it would seem, after these two murderous experiments, could scarcely be called a harmless magnet, and examined it as carefully as was possible under the light of a stable-lantern which hung from a time-darkened oak-beam several yards above his pillow.

“I have succeeded,” he told himself. “I have succeeded beyond all expectation.” Had there been an onlooker at this scene — say an angel or a devil crouched on that wooden beam above the lantern and endowed with a powerful enough sight — he might, or she might, have described this half-natural, half-artificial object to some acquaintance up in the roof in the following terms. “It is about half a foot long and is simply a spear-head of the particular colour which waves take when they are beginning to change from blue to green, a change which happens when the winds rise, not so much as a sign of a coming storm, as to prove that, if a storm did come, they would show themselves to be the proud-curving cohorts they were, of an approaching sea-god.”

With exquisite satisfaction did Master Peter of Picardy caress his newly formulated, newly invented, newly tested magnet; and as he did so a series of the wildest fantasies raced through his mind. He saw himself dominating the rulers of all the countries of the world, and through his power over them he saw himself, although always craftily in the background, having his revenge upon the whole human race.

“O how I do hate them all!” he thought. “I hate them with my brain, with my body, and with my soul! I hate them with everything I am, everything I was, and everything I shall be!”

And then he began again to wonder, as he had so often wondered before, whether it was possible that he really was that Antichrist, prophesied of from the beginning of the world, who was destined to destroy the Kingdom of Christ.

“What I would do then,” he told himself, “the moment I had got the world entirely under my control, would be to build up an absolutely different kind of world altogether. I would have no more of this hypocritical humbug about ‘love’—as if it were possible for any child of the elements, born of earth, air, water and fire, to fight for anything, to achieve anything, to enjoy anything, to become anything, except by the assertion of his separate, distinctive, individual, and unique self — and what I would aim at in my world, in my Antichrist world, in my super-scientific world, would be to create a new race of beings altogether, creatures as superior to what mankind is now as man is superior to beasts, birds, and fishes!”

The demonic delight, which radiated in the train of these thoughts through the whole being of Master Peter, was so deliciously transporting that it carried him away altogether from his material position at that moment, and bore him aloft, as if in a chariot of air and fire, a chariot that flew upward upon the waving of two wings, one of which might have been Space and the other Time, for both together seemed to acquire a mysterious force that soon carried their voyager into a sleep, if sleep it were, where he found himself in reality, if reality it were, beyond all description by the words the human race has hitherto used.

Raymond de Laon was not given to moods of special exultation or to moods of special depression. He possessed an extremely well-balanced nature. He had been saved from quarrels with parents by having been made an orphan at an early age; and he was lucky now in having found a betrothed who exactly suited him. He took the shocks and accidents and misadventures of life with a calm, and yet, in a certain way, with an exultant commonsense, that was as much a support to Lil-Umbra as it was an authentic advantage to himself in his struggle with life. He had certainly done well in his present mission; for here by his side was none other than Albertus Magnus. At this moment with his band of armed retainers, who had been rather unwillingly provided by the authorities of Cone Castle to support him on this daring embassy, he had just reached the entrance to the convent where Ghosta was employed, and they were all now about to pass, while the Sun was at his hottest on that June day, the mysterious cave in the grove of oaks and willows, which Peleg had been assured was the abode of that tinker from Wales about whom the wildest rumours were current.